Intel's Next IGP Slated to Run Sims 3

[Guest]

I recently played "The Oregon Trail" on my Intel IGP, and although the graphics were a bit choppy on the "eye-candy intensive" scenes, like floating the wagon across the river, overall, it was a very playable and satisfying experience. I'm going to try playing Donkey Kong next, I'm hoping for atleast 10 fps. I hate all of these kiddies that think you need realistic 3d graphics at 30+ fps to have a decent game... Game devs should stop worrying about eye candy and focus on the story plot, if a game can't achieve 20 fps @ 800x600 on an Intel IGP, then there's just entirely too much eye-candy

/epic sarcasm

 

[Guest]

I'm not a gamer, but I very occasionally play some of the open-source first person shooters. I have an AMD Phenom II desktop with a Radeon 4650, and it has no problem playing any game like Assault Cube or Nexuizz, if I bumped up my graphics card another notch to a 4770, I could play at the highest settings.

My laptop has a Radeon 4200 IGP and an Athlon II X2 2.0ghz, and while I can't crank up the eye-candy to uber settings, it provides very acceptable FPS at reasonable eye-candy. However, this laptop replaced a Pentium M with an Intel IGP, the IGP was so pathetic that it couldn't do Compiz desktop effects at greater than 10fps, forget about any gaming...

The main difference between AMD and Intel IGPs is that AMD's can do anything you'd want them to do at 30fps(although possibly not with eye-candy turned all the way up). Intel IGP's will basically prevent you from doing things like Compiz and playing most games.

 

[miribus]

Intel hasn't made any legitimate overtures to pc "gaming" since Larrabee, and before that the old i740 or whatever that old Real3D card was.
Bottom line is, I wouldn't compare the current dismal (for gaming) IGP offerings to what they might come up with, which have been essentially the, any more than I'd compare their Pentium 4 lineup with Core 2 or Nehalem.
Or the ATI 690-based chipset integrated video to their current 780-based.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

Now that the numbers are out, it seems Intel actually does go toe-to-toe and trade blows with AMD's fastest current integrated graphics. I'm genuinely impressed.

 

[jay2tall]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one angle It would be great for those who want to buy a run of the mill PC that can play the SIMS and a few other games. However, I think this might chew into ATI and Nvidia's bread and butter, the mid range market. But I guess options are always good.

 

[Guest]

Sounds like an invitation for jeers but intel's actually doing good work here.
Integrating better minimalist gpus into mainstream machines will ensure a leveled entry-level standard for pc gaming. Comparing these things with nvidia or amd gpus is like comparing a stock camry engine with an aftermarket custom ordered bmw supertech engine.

There's a huge population of people who go for the cheap computer using an IGP and would never think of buying separate parts just for gaming. An improvement on the performance of those machines would create a wider userbase for a ton of titles that are conservative on requirements... PC gaming would benefit way more from a moderate bump in gpu performance of 90% of the low-end beaters out there than an extra bit of performance on the 1% very high end gpus. Think of upcoming titles like starcraft2 or diablo3 where the fun isn't just in the eye candy; if these titles run correctly on these chips, I'm sold.

I very much so agree with your opinion on this subject. I could easily see all entry level machines having the equivalent of a 7600 series IGP from nvidia or whatever company. With the unified architectures it would be very easy to build a small gpu and a 128mb ram chip onto a mcm package. With all of these new chips being built at 32nm I could see them only costing maybe $10 or so onto the price of a low end rig.